truepenny | UBC: Showers, Scream at the Sky

Scream at the Sky: Five Texas Murders and One Man's Crusade for Justice by Carlton Stowers

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Observations:

(1) Where Patricia Springer (Body Hunter) was simply a bad writer, Showers is a good writer who's trying too hard.

(2) Showers is better at conveying emotional registers than Springer, particularly the gut-wrenching cruelty of the way Wardrip conned Tina Kimbrew's parents in their Victim Offender Mediation/Dialogue. I'm a little suspicious of the sea-change he attributes to Barry Macha: it seems too neat, too novelistic. But real life doesn't have to be more untidy than fiction at all times, and perhaps I'm just being too cynical.

(3) Springer did better research, for all that her research wasn't very good.

(4) I have no idea where that idiotic subtitle came from. "One Man's Crusade for Justice"? Which crusade? What man? Robert Kimbrew? Barry Macha? John Little? I think it must mean Macha, since he's the person who was involved with both the Kimbrew case and the re-opening of the cold cases on Sims, Gibbs, and Blau, but the book hardly follows Macha, and it conveys a district attorney doing his job, not a man "crusading" for justice. (To clarify: I think Macha deserves tremendous credit for not letting go of those unsolved murders and for having the independence of mind to ask for that cross-check between the DNA evidence from Sims and the DNA evidence from Gibbs, despite the "experts" who said that the two cases were unconnected. But if he wants to prove a crusade, Showers needs better evidence.)

(5) Neither Body Hunter nor Scream at the Sky is particularly satisfying, which I think is the fault not of Springer and Showers, but of their material. Faryion Wardrip is a pathological liar, a drug user, a loser who manipulates and cons, who offers remorse and takes it back: he said when he was convicted that he wasn't going to appeal, but he changed his mind about that, and he's still sitting on Death Row as his appeal grinds and grinds and grinds through state and federal courts--and that appeal isn't on the verdict. Wardrip pled guilty. It's based on the claim that in the penalty phase, his attorney did not adequately represent his good behavior during his incarceration for Kimbrew's murder. Which is an argument that it is not necessary to kill him to prevent him from harming others: just keep him in jail where, like other sociopaths, he will behave himself. But if the death sentence is commuted to life in prison, overcrowding and underfunding have a way of silently commuting life in prison to release, as the case of Kenneth McDuff (who was also the responsibility of the Texas penal system) demonstrates . . . and we're back to that old argument about the dire necessity for reform of the American penal system and the current impossibility thereof. But my actual point here is that while the murders he committed are appalling and tragic, there's nothing in Wardrip himself to merit attention, and the story of the investigation (which is what holds up other books about similarly empty people, e.g. Too Late to Say Goodbye: A True Story of Murder and Betrayal) is down to, really, (1) Macha opens cold cases, (2) gets DNA link between Sims and Gibbs, (3) gives John Little the files, (4) Little finds mention of Wardrip in Ellen Blau's file, (5) Little gets DNA from Wardrip by a clever and completely legal ruse, (5) DNA matches, (6) Wardrip is arrested and confesses, just as he confessed to Kimbrew's murder--and confesses to Debra Taylor's murder while he's at it. It makes a great episode of Forensic Files, but it's not a book.

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